


How Eliza Danvers Won a Nobel Prize

by anevolutionarymatter



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-12
Updated: 2018-10-12
Packaged: 2019-07-30 00:46:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16275737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anevolutionarymatter/pseuds/anevolutionarymatter
Summary: Eliza Danvers is a science hero.





	How Eliza Danvers Won a Nobel Prize

**Author's Note:**

> (Aka @volando_voy is a bad influence. This spiraled out of control.)

Eliza was 13 when her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Memories from that age were always a bit hazy. She remembers sneaking into her parents room, and overhearing that her mom had felt a breast lump and was going to the doctor. She remembers skipping through the door after a long day in the 8th grade, and stuttering to a stop at the look on her mom’s face. She was 13, and she knew that _cancer_ was a poisonous word.

Cancer — “the disease caused by an uncontrolled division of abnormal cells in a part of the body.” That’s the clinical definition. The problem with definitions is that they tend to fail to include what cancer means to a body, to a person, to a family. What do you do when your body is the one invading itself?

* * *

Cancer is what drove Eliza towards medicine. She remembers her mother through late nights at college, through stomach-churning study sessions in medical school, through every meticulously recorded failure in lab.

But then a little girl arrives to Earth in a pod. Five seconds after they meet, Eliza decides to push her cancer research to the backseat. She loves this little girl, and it drives her determination to understand alien physiology — to help Kara, Clark, and other aliens understand themselves.

And she loved her new work. There were so many unknowns — _do aliens need vaccinations? (No, well… it depends.) What kind of nutrition does a growing alien need? What does a healthy heart sound like? Does blood even circulate the same way? What do aliens use for energy?_ Aliens deserved good health too.

Then, serendipitously, it was actually because of Eliza’s expertise in alien science that she was able to make a breakthrough in cancer research.

* * *

The Medusa virus was a truly terrifying creation, a devastatingly effective and desperately complex bioweapon, able to kill wide swaths of many species in one fell swoop. And unlike most viruses and bacteria, which were generally limited to infecting only a handful of species, Medusa could theoretically infect an infinite number of species. Eliza couldn’t understand how it was so efficiently lethal until she realized she had been looking at it all wrong. “Virus” was a misleading word. When Zor-El developed Medusa he created much more than a simple virus, he had developed something akin to a synthetic _immune system_.

Viruses have to have a “key” to gain access and cause infection, but an immune system doesn’t even need a key. It makes it simpler; it just recognizes what is “foreign” or “not self” and attacks that. So, Medusa didn’t have to recognize an infinite number of “aliens,” it only had to recognize what was “safe” and “self,” and not attack those, while attacking everything else.

(Not like me — attack.)

(Like me — no attack.)

It was brilliant. And once Eliza recognized the pattern, she realized that not only would she be able to save J’onn by reprogramming Medusa to attack any cells that were not his own, but perhaps there was a way to use Medusa to attack other cells that were “different.” To attack cancer cells.

* * *

It wasn’t as simple as she thought. It seemed easy, to just have Medusa target cancer cells like they had targeted White Martian cells in J’onn’s body. But no matter what she tried, Medusa would either attack every cell, cancerous or not, or attack no cells at all.

The problem was that cancer cells weren’t so clearly alien. Cancer was a wolf hidden in grandma’s clothes, and no one (should) want to potentially attack a grandma, so Medusa was stopped in its tracks. They would not kill without confirmation that this cancer wasn’t grandma. This was the reason why a human’s regular immune system couldn’t get rid of cancer.

_But what was preventing Medusa from attacking these cells? The realization came suddenly._

“It’s been incredibly frustrating,” Alex groused, “Winn and James keep insisting that they’re going to tell Kara about… you know, the shield… man… thing, but so far, nothing! Kara keeps wondering why they’re spending so much less time with her. I mean, Kara has been hanging out with _Lena Luthor_ more now, which… is a whole other thing. But you know Kara, she needs constant stimulus. Between her and Maggie I feel like I barely have time to sit! Which, I’m not complaining about, because I obviously love them both very much, but sometimes…”

“Shields,” Eliza whispered, distractedly, “ _shields_.”

Alex paused over the phone. “Oh, sorry, mom. Did you say something?”

Eliza blinked a few times, setting down her coffee mug on the countertop to reach over for a steno pad and hastily scribbling down, _SHIELDS!_ “Sorry, honey, I was just distracted by my research for a second. Tell me more about how things are going with Maggie.”

“Are you sure? I know you’ve been struggling with Medusa, do you want to talk about it? Have you figured out how to prevent Medusa from attacking normal cells?”

Eliza smiled. “Oh sweetheart, I think you’ve already given me everything I need.”

* * *

_Shielding_ — grandma’s clothes didn’t trick Medusa because it thought the wolf actually looked like Grandma. It was because grandma’s clothes were the signal, the shield that actually blocked Medusa. Take away the clothing, and the wolf would be exposed.

It was the breakthrough she needed. Eliza knew that this was it; this would revolutionize cancer treatment. So, Eliza and her team worked harder. And approximately thousands of coffee cups, hundreds of papers, and one potentially semi-permanent pipette shaped hand cramp later, they succeeded.

Eliza created a drug that blocked Medusa from recognizing grandma’s clothes, allowing it to attack the cancerous wolf. She saved countless lives.

* * *

Kara always knew that Eliza Danvers was a hero. Kara was the lucky girl who got to grow up with her kind smiles, warm hugs, and incredible intelligence. But today, everyone else would know that Eliza Danvers was a hero too.

Some would say it was a conflict of interest, but this was one piece she couldn’t let anyone else write. And anyway, how could anyone possibly be too biased about this?

**_THE NATIONAL CITY TRIBUNE:  
_** _THE NOBEL PRIZE IN MEDICINE AWARDED TO ELIZA DANVERS  
_ _By: Kara Danvers_

**Author's Note:**

> October is breast cancer awareness month and this was my attempt to pay homage to that while also highlighting some very cool science. 
> 
> Besides Eliza Danvers being the best mom, this was inspired by the work of Dr. James Allison and Dr. Tasuku Honjo, who were both just awarded the Nobel Prize for their work in cancer research (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/health/nobel-prize-medicine.html). Their work (the discovery of what prevented immune cells from attacking cancer cells) paved the way for immunotherapy. 
> 
> In this story, the discovery of immunotherapy obviously occurs much later in Earth-38’s timeline (but also flying blonde aliens also aren’t around on this Earth, much to my chagrin). Grandma’s clothes are an analogy for the checkpoint between immune cells and self, while Medusa is used as a stand-in for CAR-T-cell therapy (https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-terms/def/car-t-cell-therapy) (a procedure where a person’s own immune cells are changed in a laboratory to specifically target cancer cells). 
> 
> I’m always happy to talk science and Supergirl, you can hit me up at @anevolutionarymatter on Tumblr.


End file.
